Dr. McKay is a Senior Lecturer in Social Geography and Environmental Politics at Keele University. Previously she held appointments as a Postdoctoral Fellow and then Research Fellow in the School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University. McKay earned her B.A. (1st Hons) in Biology and Master's in Environmental Studies from Dalhousie University (Canada) and a Ph.D. in Geography from the University of British Columbia. Dr. McKay's research draws on both social/cultural geography and social anthropology to explore people's place-based experiences of globalization and development. She is interested in the long-distance relations that connect outmigrants to their sending communities, changes in local livelihoods and the possibilities for locally sustainable, alternative economic development, and environmental degradation linked to migration. Dr. McKay does fieldwork in the global South and also with migrant communities from developing areas who have moved into the world's global cities. Much of her work has been conducted with people who originate in indigenous villages in the northern Philippines. Dr. McKay is the author of numerous articles, chapters, and edited collections. Her book, Global Filipinos: Migrants' Lives in the Virtual Village, was published in 2012 by Indiana University Press.

I was born in Oklahoma in 1963, but I spent most of my childhood in the Southern Philippines, living in Sulu and Zamboanga.  It is that early experience that underpins my continuing interest in and research about Filipino Muslims in particular.  After taking my first degree in California, I moved subsequently to the U.K. where I undertook postgraduate training, first in Archaeology and then Anthropology, at University College London.

My research interests and writing are focused broadly around the issues of gender/sexuality, landscape and material culture, movement and transnationalism. I have conducted ethnographic research in the Philippines, Vietnam, Costa Rica and, more recently, Saudi Arabia. My original research in the Philippines was concerned with gender and sexual diversity in the context of both real and imagined movements of people and the growth of ethno-nationalist discourse. Recent Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded research focused on the place of religion in the experiences of Filipino migrant workers in the Middle East and Saudi Arabia in particular.

Books

2011. Diasporic Journeys, Ritual, and Normativity among Asian Migrant Women. London: Routledge. (with Pnina Werbner, eds.)

1997. Beauty and Power:  Transgendering and Cultural Transformation in the Southern Philippines.  Oxford: Berg.

Edited Journal Issues

2012.  Queer Asian Subjects:  Transgressive Sexualities and Heteronormative Meanings.  Asian Studies Review 36(4) December. (with E. Blackwood, eds.)

2011. Mediated Diasporas: Material Translation of the Philippines in a Globalized World. South East Asia Research 19(2): 181-341. (with D. McKay, eds)

2010.  Diasporic Encounters, Sacred Journeys:  Ritual, Normativity and the Religious Imagination among International Asian Migrant Women. Special double issue of The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology11 (3-4): 205-448.  (with P. Werbner, eds.)

2000.  Gender and Sexual Diversity in East and South-East Asia. Culture, Health and Sexuality 2(4): 361-472. (with P. Jackson, eds.)